Building bridges to digital content

Do you know your publishing rights?

In response to the activities of certain publishers in changing their policies to retrospectively restrict the depositing of authors’ manuscripts in local, institutional or subject-based repositories, JISC has published the following statement:

Do you know your publishing rights?

JISC seeks to ensure the widest possible dissemination of UK research outputs and through its membership of the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) is calling on UK researchers to check their publishing rights.

The OAIG group says: “Recently, some publishers have sought to negotiate directly with universities and research institutes on the terms and conditions under which the authors can deposit manuscripts of their own papers into repositories.

“JISC as part of the OAIG therefore wish to state our concern with publishers who seek to limit access by imposing unacceptable embargo periods on the deposit of authors’ manuscripts in local, institutional or subject-based repositories.

“Authors should retain their right to deposit their own manuscripts, and this right should not be dependent on the later agreements to publish agreed with publishers. In particular, publishers should not seek to supersede any agreement between authors and their funders or institutions. These funders and institutions wish to see wide dissemination, with no artificial delays or embargoes – delaying the wider release of research papers for a pre-agreed period of time ie six months.

“Furthermore, where collective arrangements for licensing exist that can already cover these issues (such as in the UK with clauses in the JISC Collections Model Licence), then such direct negotiation with individual universities is doubly unhelpful and risks undermining those collective arrangements.

“The Open Access Implementation Group calls on universities not to enter into one-to-one negotiations with publishers on self-archiving rights for their staff, and instead to rely on publicly declared rights as shown on the Sherpa-RoMEO website.”

The OAIG membership includes:
Guild HE, Universities UK, UCL, Wellcome Trust, The University of Salford, The University of Edinburgh, SCONUL, Research Libraries UK, Research Councils UK, Public Library of Science, JISC, Association of Research Managers and Administrators.